Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Lit Circle #4 p. 4

7 comments:

Today, we discussed our final presentation. We have almost offically completed flagging our book. I feel like we are really doing extremly well on this project and we are all really into it! We have done some really really cool and unique things, (they're a surprise) and i can assure you Moritz it will blow your mind. Tomorrow and the next few days we will be completing our power point. Our hard work is finally coming together and we are all really excited to show you and the board members.

We discussed I am the Cheese, and how it was written. The book is narrated from two points of view, and we thought that added literary merit to the book. The book's ending summed up many loose points that we wondered about but it also left a lot for us to interpret for ourselves. On Friday we will discuss both books at once and bring them together. We have started research for our final and we will start working on it during Friday's discussion.

Today we talked about our plans for meeting up outside of school and agreed to meet on Sunday and possibly Tuesday and Thursday. We talked about that we needed to focus on Literary Merit and inappropriate material. Some Ideas we had for literary merit are that the book questions humanity and what exactly humanity is as well as where humainity is progressing torwards. We also talked about how in real life the three robot laws are the basis to being a good human being. We discusssed important passage that related to that such as when they are trying to prove a politician is a robot Dr. Calvin says that if he abides by the three laws that proves nothing other than that he is a good person so all they can prove is that he is not a robot. Also we discussed the steps to make the more advanced robot. we haven't found much inapropriate content other than challennging religion which we only discussed briefly.

First, we summarized what happened in what we read in 1984. Winston met with O'Brien and discussed the brotherhood in secret because they were able to turn the telescreen off. This lead to a discussion on controversial issues in the book. When Winston was talking with O'Brien, he says he is prepared to murder people, commit suicide, to forge, blackmail, to betray his country, and do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the party. This shows how far people were willing to go in the community in order to obtain "peace" although he was committing serious crimes which are controversial. Other controversial issues include sex, pro-communism, undermining the government, undermining authority, descriptive violence, suicide, and dehumanization. Although there are many controversial issues in this book, we also found some things that could have lead to the book being approved. For example, the lesson of the consequences of greed is portrayed when Winston steals food and almost starves his mom and little sister. This lead to the overall outlook of the book which hints what dehumanization, greed, and a plethora of power can really lead. It teaches many lessons which are vital in our community.

1984 Group 1Today we discussed our powerful passages and how we will use them in our presentations. Also we discussed how our book compares to the curriculum packet. We started finding literary techniques including motifs and symbolism. Over the next few days we will bring in a laptop and start working on our powerpoint. We hope to have it finished by next week. Most of us have finished reading the book and we are almost done flagging it.

Today, we discussed powerful passages in iRobot. One that we found very controversial and powerful was the passage in which death occurs and heaven is mentioned and they are sent to hell. This is powerful as it brings messages of after-life into the text and creates a feeling of belief. After this we went to the library and researched for our final presentation. We will begin our final presentation after we discuss more about overall Literary Merit.iRobot #1Thomas Monnet, Paul Friedrich, Hunter Kessler